Make decency and fairness the building blocks of a new society

I’VE been travelling a lot over the past few days.

I went out to meet and support Labour Party candidates, but in the process I met a lot of people.

And along the way, I found more and more evidence about something that has gone wrong in our country. Somewhere in the last few years, in the middle of what Brian Lenihan calls our “party”, we lost our sense of decency.

Well actually, we didn’t. But the government we elected three times over surely did. I thought the real mark of their decency was what they did to blind people in the last budget. But all over Ireland, there are people whose lives are in bits, solely and only because they’ve been denied the small bit of decency and fairness that we’re all entitled to expect.

There’s no doubt the government threw money around with gay abandon when it was plentiful. But that’s no measure of decency, is it? The real test of a country is how it behaves when money is scarce. A few years ago (it was one of my attempts to warn about the hard landing) I wrote a piece here that was a kind of a parody, comparing Charlie McCreevy to Joseph (of the amazing technicolour dream coat).

You remember the story of how, when Joseph was in charge of the land of plenty, he made sure the warehouses were full so that there would be enough to feed the hungry during the lean times. But in my parody, the Fianna Fáil Joseph just organised a party. Charlie’s philosophy, you remember, was “when I have it, I spend it”.

But even then you could see (and I tried to record it) that “the poor, the sick and the handicapped were still told to stay back from the doors of the warehouses, although there were a few more crumbs around in the good days, and by and large they learned to be content with them”.

Even the crumbs are gone now. The poor, the sick and the handicapped are paying for the profligacy of those times, and all sense of decency is gone out the door. On the side of one road I met one man who told me about his daughter.

She’s five, and had a traumatic brain injury which left her for two years with all the symptoms of a major stroke. She’s recovering now, but naturally, has fallen behind in school. The doctors — all of them specialists — have recommended that she must have a special needs assistant to enable her to cope with school while she catches up.

Her school principal has supported her application. If she doesn’t get the support, she can’t be readmitted to school, because they simply can’t cope. She would be going into a large class, and she’d be a full-time preoccupation for an already heavily-burdened teacher. But she has been told no. There is no money and the system, apparently, can’t see the point.

I met a woman in another town. She’s a widow, a mother and a grandmother, and she’s living in fear. Her husband actually left her well-provided for, but the nest egg was in bank shares (one of our two great banks, that we’re now supporting to the point where it is pauperising us). Not only did her savings pay a dividend, but as a shareholder she was able to guarantee mortgages for her two children.

First the dividend went. Then the shares devalued to the point of worthlessness. Now one of her children is unemployed and can’t meet the mortgage repayments on a house that is in negative equity anyway. And the bank — the bank in which she was proud to be a shareholder, the bank to which we have mortgaged our future — is writing her threatening letters about the guarantee. She has nothing left, and she can’t bear to tell her son. She’s afraid he’ll do something terrible.

I met another woman, who runs a small business in a small rural town. A year ago, that business provided a living for 12 women in the town. Now, three are employed, and the woman I met doesn’t think she can keep them going for the rest of the year.

Some of her most loyal customers are gone, and she can’t get a penny in credit to keep enough stock to service the rest. She’s a woman doing her best — actually, like thousands of small employers all over the country — and she can’t get any support from anywhere.

In Monaghan, Dublin, and all through the south east I kept hearing stories like this. And all the candidates are hearing the same things.

People from all walks of life are suffering — in many cases to the point of bewilderment. And yet, again and again, the people you meet tell you that they understand full well that the country is in terrible trouble. They’re not expecting much — everyone knows that belts have to be tightened, and we all have to make do.

But it’s the lack of any decency about it, any sense of fairness. Taxes have shot up overnight, and services of all kinds have been cut. For what? To bail out the profligate, the wasteful and the greedy, while ordinary people suffer. What’s going on all over the country amounts to an astonishing plea for decency and fairness.

In other countries, this election could well have descended into violence, so deep is the anger among the people.

Here, all people want is a government that cares, that is prepared even though resources are scarce (maybe especially because resources are scarce) to prioritise compassion, and not just competitiveness.

The people I’ve been supporting around the country are standing precisely for decency and fairness. As someone who has been doing this for a long time, I must say I found it really exciting to meet a bunch of young Labour candidates so in tune with people around the country.

I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that quite a few of them are going to start changing things when the votes are counted. People who aren’t household names now are the names of the future — precisely because they have a passion for justice.

We need young people like that in politics — and especially in government. If our economy has to be rebuilt brick by brick, then our society has to be rebuilt in exactly the same way. When there was lashings of money, we were encourage to forget our neighbours and look after number one. Now, if we can’t look out for each other — the strongest willing to help the weakest — we haven’t a hope of recovery.

Of course it’s tough out there, and of course they have to fight. But with a week and a half to go until polling day, the battle to make certain that the next government is led by principles of compassion and decency is only starting.